Within our trip to Seattle was a great visit to the Seattle Art Museum. Currently on display are two fantastic exhibits:
1) love fear pleasure lust pain glamour death — Andy Warhol Media Works [May 13–September 6, 2010]
Through a selection of Andy Warhol’s media works, this exhibition will offer a focused and provocative experience of Warhol’s photography and film portraits. Unfolding in five of the special exhibition galleries, the exhibition includes Polaroids, photobooth strips and sewn photographs, presented alongside Warhol’s Screen Tests, which will be projected in two of the galleries devoted to these moving images.
love fear pleasure lust pain glamour death includes works that compel us to consider the artist’s fascination with all things ephemeral, from beauty and youth to celebrity status. Including photographs and videos dating from the 1960s through the early 1980s—two decades in which the artist’s work had tremendous impact on contemporary art production and culture—the exhibition encourages readings of powerful themes such as fame, desire and identity construction, as well as anxiety and isolation, which often accompany stardom. In a series of self-portraits, with props or disguises such as wigs and women’s clothing, Warhol exposes his obsession with his own image and his desire to probe and push the boundaries of identity and self-invention.
love fear pleasure lust pain glamour death — Andy Warhol Media Works is on view concurrently with the exhibition Kurt and resonates with many of the works on view, as well as the exploration of fleeting celebrity, the effects it has on the celebrated, and the ways in which even a brief career can deeply move a generation.
–Marisa C. Sánchez, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
2) Kurt (Cobain) [May 13–September 6, 2010]
Grunge music is arguably Seattle’s greatest cultural export of the past 20 years, and Kurt Cobain was that movement’s central figure. The historical impact of Kurt Cobain cannot be denied or overestimated. During and after his brief career—which came to a premature end in 1994—his life and work have reverberated across the globe. Kurt celebrates that influence, in particular the effect he had on the creative lives and thought processes of artists.
Kurt Cobain symbolized the ideals, aspirations and disappointments of the ’90s generation, and a diverse array of artists have incorporated his image into their work to comment on those issues. International in scope, the works on view in Kurt range from straightforward portraiture to pieces that show a more subtle assimilation of Cobain’s ethos and idealism in a broad range of media. With works from the early 1990s to the present, by artists such as Rodney Graham, Douglas Gordon and Elizabeth Peyton, among others, this exhibition will cause viewers to question why and how Kurt’s visage and his gestures came to mean so much to a generation.
–Michael Darling, Former Jon & Mary Shirley Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art
Hit the button to see the snaps I took before getting pounced on by security (click thumbnails to use image scroller):
